Henry Ford, in his The International Jew: The World's
Foremost Problem (1921) fulminated:

"Let me make a nation's songs and I care not who makes
the laws," said one; in this country the Jews have had a very large hand
in making both. It is the purpose of this article to put people in possession
of the truth concerning the moron music which they habitually hum and sing
and shout day and night, and if possible to help them to see the invisible
Jewish baton which is waved above them for financial and propaganda purposes.
Just as the American stage and motion picture have fallen under the control
of Jews and their art-destroying commercialism, so the business of handling
"popular songs" has become a Yiddish industry. The Jews who captured it
in the early days of exploitation were for the most part Russian-born Jews,
some of whom had personal pasts which were as unsavory as the past of many
Jewish theatrical and movie leaders have been exposed to be.

Chief among the Jewish villians Ford pointed to was Irving
Berlin. It was he who made the remark about making the nation's songs. And
he did. When Jerome Kern, a native-born Protestant, was asked what Berlin's
place was in American music, he responded: "Irving Berlin doesn't have
a place in American music. He is American music." For Kern this
was an accolade. For Ford it was proof of a Jewish conspiracy. Nor was it
only Berlin. Dozens of other song writers were Jews. George and Ira Gershwin
wrote almost as many hit songs as Berlin. And George Gershwin's "Rhapsody
in Blue" and other extended compositions made him the most important
American composer of the 1920s as well.

Ford's monomania made him blame the Jews for everything
he disliked. This most emphatically included Jazz music. "Jazz is a Jewish
creation," He insisted.

The mush, slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned
sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.

Monkey talk, jungle squeals, grunts and squeaks and
gasps suggestive of calf love are camouflaged by a few feverish notes and
admitted in homes where the thing itself, unaided by scanned music, would
be stamped out in horror. The fluttering music sheets disclose expressions
taken directly from the cesspools of modern capitals, to be made the daily
slang, the thoughtlessly hummed remarks of school boys and girls.

. . . . .

It is little use blaming the people. The people are
what they are made. Give the liquor business full sway and you have a population
that drinks and carouses. The population could be turned into drug addicts
if the same freedom was given to the illicit narcotic ring as is now given
to the Yiddish popular song manufacturers. In such a condition it would
be stupid to attack the addicts; common sense would urge the exposure of
the panderers.

A dreadful narcotizing of moral modesty and the application
of powerful aphrodisiacs have been involved in the present craze for crooning
songs--a stimulated craze. The victims are everywhere. But too few of the
opponents of this moral poison see the futility of scolding the young people
thus diseased.

Common sense dictates a cleaning out, and a clearing
out, of the sources of the disease. The source is in the Yiddish group of
song manufacturers who control the whole output and who are responsible
for the whole matter from poetry to profits.

As
Berlin or Gershwin could have informed him, jazz was an African-American creation,
albeit one that immigrant and second-generation Jewish songwriters and performers
passionately embraced and importantly influenced. Further, whether played
by the aptly named Paul Whiteman or by Armstrong or Duke Ellington or Fletcher
Henderson, it came to dominate American music. Black composer and pianist
James P. Johnson wrote the twenties' unofficial anthem, Charleston
(here played by the Whiteman Orchestra). Armstrong's "Hot
Five" and "Hot
Seven" recordings influenced everyone who played or wrote music --
notably Bix Beirderbecke, lead trumphet in the Whiteman Orchestra and one
of the first white jazz greats (here
playing Wa Da Wa) -- and attracted a wide following among whites who previously
had not listened to "race" music. In 1927 Bix and the Whiteman Orchestra
recorded Washboard
Blues, written by Bix's friend Hoagy Carmichael. [The
Hoagy Carmichael Collection at the University of Indiana, in addition
to other materials, contains online recordings of a number of Carmichael's
songs, including the first recording of Washboard Blues.] Also in 1927 Edward
Kennedy "Duke" Ellington and his Orchestra became the house band
at the Cotton
Club in Harlem. [Here is a 1922 Victor recording of an early Ellington
classic, The
Mooche.] With the engagement came a national radio hook-up. Like Armstrong,
Ellington's influence on American music, popular and serious, proved profound.